African nations mobilize against widening Ebola crisis - Semafor

Health officials from 45 African countries met Wednesday to coordinate a continent-wide response to an Ebola outbreak that has killed nearly 5,000 people in DR Congo and spread to Kenya and Nigeria, as an assessment presented at the meeting showed only three of 31 countries evaluated were adequately prepared to respond.

“Our member states, they agree and they commit to implement all actions that we discussed today, including strengthening the preparedness efforts,” said Jean Kaseya, head of Africa CDC, the continent’s public health agency. The recommendations include coordinating efforts across borders, keeping borders open and tracking response funding to ensure it reaches frontline teams.

Kaseya told Semafor in an interview last week that he feared content-wide spread was possible. Data presented to ministers showed no sustained decline in new cases for 11 weeks in DR Congo, where more than 10,000 infections have been confirmed, while aid organizations warned that funding was failing to keep pace with the scale of the outbreak.

The Ebola response has drawn funding from several countries, with the US as the largest donor. Taylor Sexton, a State Department official, said Washington was providing more than $1.2 billion to fight the outbreak. The first priority of the US response, he said, was “to protect the homeland and Americans at home and abroad.”